Presently, it is common for individuals or businesses to have residing within their offices a postage meter rented from a commercial supplier. This arrangement is very convenient, since letters may be addressed, postage applied, and mailed directly from the office without requiring an employee to physically visit the United States Post Office and wait in line in order to apply postage to what is often a quite significant volume of outgoing mail, or to manually apply stamps to each piece of mail in which case mail is slower because it has to go through a postage canceling machine.
Quite naturally, postage meters were developed to relieve the manual application of stamps on mail and to automate the above process. Nevertheless, a postage meter residing within an office is not as convenient and efficient as it may first seem to be. First, a postage meter may not be purchased, but must be rented. The rental fees alone are typically over twenty dollars per month. For a small business, this can be quite an expense to incur year after year. Second, a postage meter must be adjusted, serviced and replenished manually; e.g., each day the date must be adjusted manually, periodically the stamp pad must be re-inked, and when the amount of postage credit programmed within the postage meter has expired, the postage credit must be replenished. To be replenished, a postage meter must be manually unplugged, placed into a special case (the meter is of a significant weight), and taken to a United States Post Office to have the meter reprogrammed with additional postage credit. Upon arrival at the United States Post Office, a teller must cut the seal, replenish the meter with a desired amount of postage credit, and reseal the meter. The meter must then be returned to the office and powered up.
A slightly more expensive meter (rental of approximately $30.00 more) works in the following manner: 1) a user sets up an account with the meter supplier, 2) 7 to 10 days before a user requires any postage, the user deposits with the meter owner the amount of postage required, 3) the user then calls the owner (7 to 10 days later) and they issue instructions as to the manual pushing of a variety of buttons on the meter (programming) which will replenish the postage amount on the meter. Nonetheless, the meter must be taken to the Post Office every 6 months.
Thus, in addition to the monthly rent, the servicing and replenishing of the meter requires the time and expense of at least one employee to take the meter to the United States Post Office to have it checked. Of course, this procedure results in down-time wherein the postage meter is not available to the business for the application of postage to outgoing mail. In addition, because of the monthly rent and the size of these devices, it is generally not practical for businesses to have more than one postage meter to alleviate this down-time.
A more recent solution to postage metering is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,510,992 entitled SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR AUTOMATICALLY PRINTING POSTAGE ON MAIL, assigned to Post N Mail, L.C., Houston Tex., and is hereby incorporated by reference. There, the disclosed metering system provides for the sale of postage credit on portable processor devices to be later utilized as needed. However, such a system, although considerably more convenient than the traditional metering systems discussed above, still requires the prepurchase of postage credit in order to be available at the time of generating a postage indicia.
The alternative to a postage meter and its associated prepurchased postage credit to a business, especially a small business, is to forego the advantages of a postage meter and to buy sheets, or books, of stamps. Without a doubt, this is not a sufficient solution. A variety of denominations of stamps are generally required since applying two 32.cent. stamps to a letter requiring only 40.cent. will add up over time. Additionally, it is difficult for a business to keep track of stamp inventories, and stamps are subject to pilferage and degeneration from faulty handling. Moreover, increases in the postal rate (which seem to occur every three years) and the requirement for variable amounts of postage for international mail, makes the purchase of stamps even more inefficient and uneconomical.
Because of different postage zones, different classes of mail, different postage required by international mail and the inefficiency of maintaining stamps within an office, it is important to have an automatic postage system, such as the aforementioned inefficient and relatively expensive postage meter.
A need in the art therefore exists for a system and method that provides the correct amount of authorized postage on demand at locations other than a United States Post Office, while avoiding the use of a traditional postage meter or the use of any supply of postage credit at the demand site. Moreover, there is a need in the art for a system and method which allows the substantially instantaneous affixing of this authorized postage upon an item of mail after demand.
It is, therefore, advantageous for the provision of postage credit to be transmitted to demanding locations by a substantially automated system and method. Furthermore, any such system and method needs to maintain strict controls on the issuing of such indicia. These controls may provide verification of a request for postage so as to expose any rogue postage requests.
Additionally, it would be advantageous for any processor-based system providing postage metering requests and subsequent imprinting to interface with a user friendly operating environment that is flexible and which can be coupled to other programs such as word processing, spreadsheet, accounting, database, or graphics programs. It would further be advantageous for a processor-based system providing postage metering to also provide verification and/or updating of address information to ensure speedy and reliable delivery of mail pieces without requiring an operation to manually look-up or update such information.